


Old Friends & Mistletoe

by quills_at_dawn



Series: Witcher Shorts [8]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Inspired by A Christmas Carol, M/M, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21859993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quills_at_dawn/pseuds/quills_at_dawn
Summary: In all the many years Vernon Roche had spent banqueting with Foltest he had never spent as much time at the table for mealtimes as he had since moving to Toussaint, and this Yuletide took the cake.Post-Blood and Wine, Roche and Iorveth spend their first Yuletide in Toussaint since moving there.Sequel toMending Fences
Relationships: Iorveth/Vernon Roche
Series: Witcher Shorts [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1436413
Comments: 17
Kudos: 132





	Old Friends & Mistletoe

**Author's Note:**

> More Roche introspection <3  
> 

**OLD FRIENDS & MISTLETOE**

In all the many years Vernon Roche had spent banqueting with Foltest he had never spent as much time at the table for mealtimes as he had since moving to Toussaint and this Yuletide took the cake. 

“What’s the story behind the mistletoe?” Eskel asked, indicating the sprig tucked behind Iorveth’s ear, “And all the kissing. Elven tradition?” 

“An ancient one. We hang clusters and kiss beneath them to remind ourselves that all elves are kin and should love one another,“ Iorveth nodded then glanced at Roche, “We tried to extend it to humans but they seemed to take it the wrong way.” 

“And the bits you wear?” 

“Those we give to someone close to us, to grant them one kiss for each berry. We keep the boughs and when they dry and turn golden we weave them into wreath crowns with the first blooms of spring and wear them to mark the end of winter.” 

“At least that’s almost reasonable,” Lambert grumbled, piling yet another generous helping of everything onto his plate, “Believing you can keep the Wild Hunt away by burning a log and eating a pig the way most people do is the stupidest superstitious shit ever.” 

Roche watched him, dimly unimpressed and dimly appalled. 

They’d spent months preparing and provisioning for the winter and the Duchess — who treated them, Iorveth especially, like lucky charms or favoured pets — had sent over several cratefuls of delicacies. Roche had protested that trying to store a quantity of provisions that would last _years_ rather than months was more trouble than it was worth. 

But he had not accounted for witcher metabolisms and appetites. 

Two of them had descended onto Corvo Bianco like a concentrated and noisy plague of locusts. 

Fortunately, this was not their first Yuletide spent at Corvo Bianco so Geralt and Marlene knew exactly what to expect. 

Eventually the meal did come to an end and as they all leaned back in their chairs, Iorveth hooked one of his legs over Roche’s and Roche immediately put his hand on it, rubbing his thumb along the firm thigh. 

“Remember how we used to sit on the roof to drink so Vesemir wouldn’t find us?” Eskel asked, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. 

Gerald nodded. 

“Hold the cups so the moon was reflected in them and then knock them back to drink the moonlight.” 

“Yeah, and that Skellige moonshine nearly made us blind,” Lambert grumbled. 

Geralt grinned and looked around the table. 

“Could do it again. Got a roof and a moon and plenty of Regis’ mandrake hooch.” 

Eskel grinned broadly. 

“I like it,” he agreed, his gaze swinging to Iorveth and Roche, “Join us?” 

Roche quickly declined on his behalf and Iorveth’s when he saw the speculative gleam in his demented elf’s eyes. 

So when the witchers trooped out, the two of them went to the front room to sit by the fire. 

“Drinking on the roof,” Roche huffed, flinging himself onto an armchair and tugging Iorveth onto his lap, “It must be minus fifty out there!” 

“Closer to minus five,” Iorveth corrected mildly before giving him a kiss, throwing his legs over the armrest. 

Roche put his hand back on Iorveth’s thigh, right over the mental handprint he’d left there. 

“Did you miss me?” he asked the elf. 

“When?” 

“Over dinner?” 

Iorveth bit back a bark of laughter at that. 

“ _Bloede d’hoine_ ,” he murmured without heat against Roche’s mouth before giving him a quick, hard kiss. 

“Me?” Roche snorted, “I’m not the one who spent the day kissing everyone. You kissed Marlene. You kissed _Lambert_!” 

“It’s traditional,” Iorveth shrugged. 

“For elves!” Roche protested. 

Iorveth gave him a sly look and took the sprig from behind his ear. 

“So you’re not interested in this?” 

“I didn’t say that,” Roche defended gruffly, taking the mistletoe from him. 

Iorveth smiled and gave him a long kiss then took one of the berries from the sprig, and then another with each kiss he lavished on the human. 

“Can I save the last one for later?” Roche asked a little breathlessly. 

“As you like,” Iorveth granted, his long fingers wrapped across Roche’s nape to keep their foreheads pressed together. 

They were startled out of their intimacy by the ululations of the witchers howling at the moon. 

Roche growled at the ceiling but Iorveth huffed with laughter and kissed the frown lines away. 

“What does Ves say?” he asked, nodding at the letter Roche had received that day. 

“She’s aiming to get here in late spring. She doesn’t want to risk the children before the spring showers are well and truly over.” 

“That’ll give us more time to get everything ready. It’ll be nice seeing her again,” Iorveth remarked, then the corner of his mouth curved into a smirk, “She could stay for the wedding.” 

Roche groaned and pulled a laughing Iorveth close for another kiss. 

The Duchess kept dropping hints about a June wedding and while Iorveth never actively encouraged her he always showed more polite interest than strictly necessary in all the suggestions she made regarding the cake, the venue, the invitations, the ceremony, and all the other traditional horrors. 

Roche had made it clear to Iorveth that if that was what he wanted then he would get it, secure in the knowledge that Iorveth would rather elope into the forest with only woodland beasts for witnesses. 

It might, he thought darkly as he looked into Iorveth’s handsome face, still come to that. 

Their formal engagement hadn’t discouraged anyone from chasing after the popular elf and while Roche’s vice-grip jealousy had eased over time he was tempted by the possibility of making it as clear as humanly possible that his elf was… well, _his_. 

“We could camp out in our cottage, hmm? Just for a few days?” 

“Roche, parts of it don’t even have a roof,” Iorveth reminded him reasonably, shifting onto his side and laying his head against Roche’s shoulder, “Besides, it’s nice having more people around.” 

Roche felt Iorveth yawn, reached for a nearby throw blanket and awkwardly flicked it over the two of them then adjusted it while he thought about what Iorveth had said. 

It _was_ nice having people around. Especially since the two witchers were Northerners, after a fashion. After all, Kaer Morhen was so far north in the mountains of Kaedwen it very nearly came out the other side of them. 

And though Iorveth was something of a loner, as Roche was, he was also an elf and elves were gregarious by nature. Iorveth liked having people around, even when they weren’t elves, whether it was the farmhands or the knights errant or any of Geralt’s friends, or even two witchers who ate like ten. 

Roche didn’t mind people but in his mind they existed in a clear hierarchy, with Iorveth right at the top, Geralt and Ves close behind, and everybody else loosely jumbled in with the rest of humanity and other miscellanea. 

And what Roche really wanted was for the two of them to have their own space. So Iorveth could walk around naked if he wanted to, so they could be unsociable if they wanted to, and so Roche could finally, _finally_ give in to depravity and do all the filthy things he was dying to do to Iorveth, then do them again and again until the elf screamed and begged for release. 

Even this cuddling in front of the fire was a novelty since it was unusual for them to indulge even this much out in the open like this — in a place where anyone might walk in and see them — never mind having the kind of unbridled sex Roche dreamt of when people might hear them. 

Roche was well aware that nobody cared — judging by how loud Geralt was whenever his friend, Regis, spent the night. 

A vampire. A _higher_ vampire. 

Being in a stable, committed relationship with a former terrorist elf seemed downright tame by comparison. Iorveth was just as able to kill him — and perhaps even marginally more often inclined to — but at least he was less likely to exsanguinate Roche before or after the deed was done. 

No, it was that even knowing all this, Roche couldn’t help being held back by a certain congenital Northern prudishness and by years of instinctive and now ingrained discretion. Back when he’d been captain of the Blue Stripes and Foltest was still alive, rumours about him had been rife at court but nobody would have dared mention them to his face or try to use them against him. Well, nobody who had survived trying. But since the peace, he’d had to keep a lower profile, often going celibate for weeks out of lack of opportunity or the absence of any urge. 

Here, with Iorveth, the opportunity and the urge were always there, usually just an arm’s length away. 

Roche slipped his hand under Iorveth’s sweater and under his shirt so he could stroke it up his back, smiling as the familiar feel of the knobbly chain of Iorveth’s vertebrae beneath his palm. 

Marlene, who still fussed over Iorveth even though he’d already gained all the weight he ever would, had knitted him the sweater from the finest Toussaint wool — red and white to suit his bandanna and stark colouring, with a line of holly leaves across the chest. She’d offered to make Roche one too. Just once. 

It wasn’t the most tasteful sweater, nor the most subtle, but even Roche had to admit that the wool was soft and it kept Iorveth warm and comfortable. 

So warm and comfortable that the elf had already fallen asleep. 

To slip more easily into this new life they’d all shed their old ones and it wasn’t often that they allowed themselves reminiscences. Geralt’s fellow witchers shared his memories but Roche wondered how much Iorveth missed his Aen Seidhe and if he too had held back details of a life now distant but still near to his heart. 

The Blue Stripes had not observed Yule traditions. They swore by Melitele but that was just blasphemy of the most pedestrian kind and not rooted in any spiritual belief at all. They hadn’t even believed in spiritual beliefs. How could they? They were torturers and murderers, they had watched countless victims pray to every possible god for salvation, for rescue, for a painless death. It had never done any of them any good. 

And yet on every Yule eve they’d ended up in a warm tavern somewhere, drinking until late in the night while they took turns carving the figure of their tattoos into the largest log available, which Ves would then toss onto the fire. And they’d only wandered off to bed once it had been consumed by the flames. 

A ritual that never spoke its name to ward off the Wild Hunt, which they hadn’t believed in. 

Only it turned out the Hunt was real and if Roche had known then what he knew now, he’d have incinerated a whole stere of logs. 

He’d been wrong about the Hunt, wrong about Iorveth, wrong about so many things. 

Eyes already half closed with sleep, he brushed his lips against Iorveth’s hair, relishing the cool, silk finish of it, breathing deep past the woodsmoke that clung to it to the elf’s own scent beneath. 

He hadn’t deserved this second chance but he would hold onto it with everything he had. 

These thoughts still swirled around his mind as he slipped into dark sleep and there they plagued him, no longer kept at bay by the light of the fire and conscious thought. 

He saw and smelled the corpses of elves and humans he had killed. He saw the bodies of dozens of the elves strung up from nooses then watched in deepening horror was they morphed into those of his Blue Stripes. He watched Foltest fall to the ground, dead, the thread of his life snapped as suddenly as Iorveth’s might have been at any point in the years they’d known each other. The irrevocable loss, the permanence of the absence, the void left by a life that wasn’t just lost but extinct, blown out of existence. 

The vertigo, the sense of falling, brought Roche back to wakefulness with a start and in that first moment of consciousness he was still in the past, among the dead. 

The familiar room lit low by the flames, the smell of the wood fire and of Iorveth, and especially the weight and feel of Iorveth’s living, breathing body on his own, brought him back to the present, though he instinctively tightened his grip on Iorveth protectively. 

Still running on adrenaline and dread, his mind checked his body for pain or injuries. His leg had fallen asleep so he bent it gingerly before crossed his ankles, grimacing briefly at the pain, then buried his nose in Iorveth’s hair, still holding him securely. 

“Roche?” the elf mumbled into his shoulder sleepily. 

Roche kissed Iorveth’s ear, his hold on him tightening instinctively. 

“It’s nothing. My leg fell asleep.” 

He felt a yawn and Iorveth’s body tense momentarily before settling again. 

They were safe. Iorveth was safe. 

Nilfgaard would do all it could to prevent another war and Toussaint had not known war in over a century. 

He pressed a kiss onto Iorveth’s shoulder. It had been a long while since he’d really cared about something, someone. It was strange, it was warming, but it had brought fear back into his life. 

There would be no more wars for the two of them, not even for Iorveth, Roche would do all he could to ensure it. 

Not that Iorveth would be in any hurry to throw himself into another destructive war now that he’d discovered how much more rewarding it was to help with reconstruction in peacetime, Roche thought as his gaze alit on Ves’ letter. 

It had somehow fallen from the table where he’d left it and now lay on the floor within the warm glow of light from the fire. From here, Roche could make out the superscription in the familiar hand. 

_Roche._

Even the name seemed to come from another time. He was Sir Vernon now that the Duchess had had her way and knighted him — as much because she thought it would look better on the wedding invitations as for any other reason. 

What the Duchess wanted the Duchess got, even if it meant turning mice into horses, and like a fairy godmother she had a talent for turning dreams into reality. 

When she’d first floated the idea of starting an orphanage for some of Ves’ many orphans, Roche thought he’d misheard or misunderstood. 

Ves’ founding of an orphanage in Temeria that accepted not just Temerians and Aedirnians, elves and dwarves, but also Kaedwenis and even Redanians, had been difficult and controversial. There was so much want and need anywhere that people had become jealous of charity. 

But Toussaint prided itself on being a land of happy endings and over-abundance. 

Anna Henrietta had written of her idea to Ciaran who had spoken to Emhyr who had agreed the empire would provide part of the funding. Anna Henrietta had immediately named herself, Geralt, Iorveth, Roche, and Ves — whom she’d never yet met — to the board of the as yet nonexistent orphanage. 

A contact of Ciaran’s in Toussaint, a marquis who was also put on the board, had offered to find a location and had quickly found the perfect one — one of the abandoned chateaux, complete with a domain where the children could have a herb garden, grow flowers and vegetables, keep goats for milk, all an easy distance from a good-sized town with tradesmen some of them might someday become apprenticed to. 

Roche himself had been recruited as the general foreman for the reconstruction works while Iorveth would be charged with coordinating furniture requirements with the various suppliers and tradesmen who had already agreed to donate pieces at the Duchess’ suggestion. 

Several Nilfgaardian merchants and a number of Toussaintois ones that Geralt had saved from one certain death or another over the years had volunteered space in their caravans for Ves, the children, their minders and belongings to make the journey south. 

They had barely broken ground on the project but Anna Henrietta was already planning the outfit she would wear when she finally cut the ribbon on it and Roche had no doubt that it would happen, as fantastical as it sounded. 

They’d already agreed that Ves would stay through the summer to make her selection from the final shortlist of potential tutors and carers, and to settle the kids in. She could probably be persuaded to stay into the fall since in many ways harvest season was the Duchy’s most joyous. Perhaps she would overwinter here, there would be plenty of space at Corvo Bianco or at their renovated cottage. 

A reunion of old Northern warriors forging peace. And new traditions. 

Roche kissed Iorveth’s long ear and the sprig of mistletoe still tucked behind it, inched a little lower in his armchair and allowed himself to relax. 

It really would be good to see Ves again. 

He watched the flamelight thrown out by the fireplace flicker over the patterned carpet, upholstered chairs and other bits of furniture, and felt his eyes grow heavy again. 

And then, there, just at the edges of where the fire’s glow reached, the ghosts of his Blue Stripes appeared — seated in the armchairs, perched on tables or leaning against the sideboard — and as Roche watched, already too far asleep to ask them what they were doing there, they all raised their tankards to drink his health. 

When they faded away, Roche let his eyes close, a faint smile loosening the lines of his face. 

Yes, it would be good to see Ves again. 

(Thank you, Zemyr!)

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays! <3


End file.
